


Household Poisons

by alouette_des_champs



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Established Relationship, Even the basics like not incurring head trauma, F/M, Farmer realizes that she sucks at self-care, Fluff, Light Angst, POV Second Person, Reader-Insert, Reader-Interactive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-29 20:13:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21415996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alouette_des_champs/pseuds/alouette_des_champs
Summary: If you had to identify one overarching ethos in your life, it would berelentlessness.
Relationships: Harvey/Female Player (Stardew Valley)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 78





	Household Poisons

**Author's Note:**

> If you couldn't already tell, one of my fav ship dynamics is shy nerd/feral extrovert. I wrote this to make myself feel better after a No Good Very Bad Week, so it's basically cotton candy. I'm pretty sure that title is a fragment from a "Lizzie: The Musical" song that lodged permanently in the back of my brain years ago.

If you had to identify one overarching ethos in your life, it would be _relentlessness._ You are relentless in everything you choose to pursue, whether that be a job, a relationship, or a test of physical or mental endurance. You are resilient as a cockroach and brave to the point of stupidity. You don’t do fear, you don’t second-guess yourself, and you do _not_ slow down. You just keep barreling forward at breakneck speed toward whatever comes next.

That’s how you ended up out in the middle of nowhere on your grandfather’s derelict farm, building it back up from nothing. That’s also how you met your boyfriend, incidentally. You woke up one scorching summer afternoon in a hospital bed with five stitches in your scalp and an IV jabbed in your arm after passing out from heat exhaustion and bonking your head on a rock. Your memory of the incident was pretty spotty, but Harvey had filled you in on the details during a very long and stern lecture that you would have blown off had you not been too sore and woozy to stand up and leave.

A week later, you’d had to go back to get the stitches taken out. You had been absolutely dreading another speech about the dangers of improper hydration, but the visit had been surprisingly pleasant. The two of you had talked about your grandpa, about how even years after his death, people in Pelican Town were still using his absurd folk remedies instead of visiting the clinic. It had taken him a long time, Harvey said, to convince the older members of the community that Western medicine had a place alongside the recipes for the cryptic poultices and tinctures that your grandfather had mixed up in his farmhouse kitchen. It had filled you with a strange sort of pride. Grandpa hadn’t always been right, but he _had_ always stuck to his guns, and there was something to be said for that tenacity.

After that, you’d just kept visiting the notoriously underutilized clinic, ostensibly to pick up vitamins to keep you from crashing and burning again, but mostly to have lunch with Harvey. Once you got over the initial hump of his social anxiety, the picture of who he really is began to come into focus: clever, charming, and consummately sweet. You wish everyone in town would take the time to get to know him, to see him as you see him. You may have all the politesse of a hog in a mud puddle, but you know a good man when you see one.

He comes over to make dinner once or twice a week. To the best of your knowledge, there is no evidence that he ever cooked for himself before you started dating, but he must have learned somewhere. He’s a decent chef. You entertain him while he cooks, sitting on the counter in the ugly thermals you wear under your work clothes and telling him stories, jokes, funny things that happen on the farm. You are very adept at being just the right amount of cheeky to make someone laugh without driving them insane. You try to take swigs from from the bottle of cooking sherry while he plays keep-away. 

“Can you behave for once?” he tuts, eyes sparkling with amusement as he holds the bottle out of your reach.

“Never.” You catch his sleeve and pull him over, between your knees, so that you can kiss him. It always feels like a breath of fresh air, light and intoxicating. He’s holding the sherry in one hand, but the other cups your cheek tenderly for a brief moment before he breaks away.

“I’m going to burn your kitchen down if I’m not careful. After Robin worked so hard on the renovations.”

You widen your eyes dramatically. “Oh, God. We’d better hope we both die of smoke inhalation. That would be easier than having to tell her we torched her handiwork.”

Dinner _is_ a little burnt, but it’s still good. Harvey insists on doing the dishes afterward even though you would just as soon leave them for tomorrow. You wash, and he dries; he knows where things belong in your kitchen better than you do. When he leans in to give you what is perhaps supposed to be a goodbye kiss, you wrap your arms around his neck and don’t let go.

“Stay the night,” you whisper in his ear. You hate sleeping alone. That was the thing you disliked the most about the farm when you’d first moved in: too much time alone with yourself, too much silence and darkness in the night, too much time to think. He has never once said no to you, even though his days are long and you only make them longer. He already has a toothbrush and a set of pajamas in your room. If you’re by yourself, you usually just fall into bed and pass out without even bothering to brush your teeth, but his presence forces you to carve out some sort of nightly routine. You even wash your face like a civilized adult human woman.

You’re both tired, but you’re still at the stage in your relationship where you can’t resist at least making out a little when you’re in the same bed. Normally, you get irritated with people who want to kiss you all night instead of moving on to the main event, but there’s something different about him, something lingering and smoldering about the drag of his lips against yours that you’ve never experienced before. There’s something so all-consuming about the way he touches you, running his hands over your body while he kisses your mouth, your neck, your ear, the little sliver of shoulder exposed by your shirt…you’re so caught up that you forget to be impatient.

All of a sudden, he pulls away from you and reaches for his glasses on the nightstand. Before you can even ask what’s wrong, he pushes the elastic of your pajama pants down a little so he can see the full extent of the raised black-and-blue welt on your hip. It smarts a little when he touches it.

“You’re all bruised up,” he says, obviously dismayed. You shrug.

“I slipped in the back pasture in the rain and ate shit. Luckily there was nobody around to see but the cows.” He still looks troubled. You smile reassuringly, brushing the hair off his forehead. “What’s wrong? I’m fine, doc. Nothing broken. No permanent damage.”

Harvey swallows. “I don’t know how to say this without offending you.”

“Then just say it.” This comes out a little more bluntly than you mean it to, and he flinches. He opens and closes his mouth a few times fruitlessly, then shakes his head. 

“I wish you knew that you deserve to be taken care of. You’re always…throwing yourself around like a rag doll. Working too hard, not eating enough, putting yourself in bad situations…it seems like you’re punishing yourself for something. I just don’t know what.”

A lump forms in your throat, the kind that comes right before you cry. Your face heats up with what might be shame. You try to draw back, but he holds you where you are, already apologizing.

“I’m sorry. I knew that would come out wrong. Just lay with me for a minute.” He pulls the blanket up around the two of you. You acquiesce and rest your cheek against his broad chest, against the familiar sound of his heartbeat, always just a little faster than it should be.

The miserable life you’d led in the city, your soulless job, the drab apartment that you never spent any time in, your seemingly endless string of toxic, violent relationships…you haven’t even begun to process it all, let alone the upheaval of the past year. You do whatever you can to avoid thinking about it. Changing everything around you feels a lot like changing yourself, except that it’s not. You are exactly the same mess that you were when you left the city.

“I guess I thought the universe wouldn’t let me start over if I didn’t work hard,” you murmur, breaking the silence. 

“Why does working hard have to mean killing yourself?” He smooths your hair against the back of your head.

“That’s how my grandpa did things. It worked for him.” But had it? Your grandpa was well-loved and well-respected in his community, but he had died long before he should have, in pain from a lifetime of hard labor, with nobody there except for you. You were the person closest to him in the world, and even you didn’t really know him. You had almost been surprised to receive the deed to the farm, an uncommon gesture of affection and generosity from a man so stubborn and so absorbed in being self-sufficient that he had begun to seem like an island or a god.

“I don’t want to make you feel like there’s something wrong with you,” Harvey says. “But I _am_ worried about you.”

“I don’t think I know how to be different.”

“I want to take care of you in every way you’ll let me,” he says softly. And then you do start to cry, because who wouldn’t? It’s almost impossibly sweet. He holds you a little tighter. “I mean that. I lived a long time before I met you, and nothing or nobody has ever made me feel quite as comfortable in my own skin as you do. I want to return that favor.”

After a moment, you sit up, wiping your eyes with your sleeve. You breathe out shakily. “You have to warn me before you’re going to be romantic. I clearly can’t handle it.” 

“Are you okay?” he asks, his brow still furrowed with concern. You lean forward and kiss him on the stubbly cheek.

“I’m okay. And you have my permission to remind me that I’m a person sometimes.” He reaches for your hand and laces his fingers with yours, smiling, relieved. You look into his eyes and see an disarming earnestness and trust there. Nobody has ever really trusted you before. You are going to try your best to deserve it.

You sleep deeply that night, exhausted. You dream that your grandfather is sitting at your kitchen table, shucking ear after ear of corn in a few quick, practiced jerks. 

“If you boil the corn silk, add some honey and a pinch of salt, then drink it every morning for a week, it’ll help you heal faster,” Grandpa says in his matter-of-fact way, his eyes fixed on his work. His gnarled and spotted hands, blue-veined and ashy, separate the corn silk from the other parts of the husk. “Let it breathe. Don’t put a bandage on it. Wounds need air.”

His hard blue eyes, bright even in the glare of the morning sunshine, lock onto you. He chuckles, tugging on his long beard. “’Course, you’ve always gone your own way…a regular little Contrary Mary. All I can do is tell you what I know and hope you use it when you need it.” He reaches out to chuck you under the chin, and when he touches you, you wake up.


End file.
